Court of Veils

by Violet Winspear

  ‘You know better now?’ he drawled.

  ‘I know the worst,’ Roslyn said, fingering a bruise on her upper arm. ‘What sort of plantation did you supervise out in the jungle ?’

  ‘Rosewood, wild rubber, pineapples and coffee,’ he listed.

  ‘Do you prefer being a date planter?’

  ‘In some ways,’ he agreed. ‘This is Gerard property and I am a Gerard. Whatever effort I put into the place is ploughed back into our pockets mainly, and I can enjoy a sense of personal victory and gain when we reap a particularly good harvest of fruit, or when a new idea of mine proves successful.’

  ‘I should imagine that Dar al Amra is more attractive altogether than a plantation surrounded by bush and subject to torrential rains every so often,’ Roslyn remarked.

  Duane Hunter’s eyes narrowed to that chatoyant glint that was so unnerving. ‘How come you know such geographical facts, and yet lay claim to having no recollection of personal matters?’ he demanded.

  ‘The doctor at the hospital explained that it was one of the mysteries of amnesia,’ she was on the defensive at once. ‘I’m not playing a part, Mr. Hunter. My mind is a blank as far as personal matters are concerned ... my engagement to your cousin is real to me only because I wear his ring.’

  Duane’s eyes raked her face, then deliberately he turned to a mass of flowers cloaking the wall beside them, creamy blooms with hidden hearts. He plucked one and ruthlessly forced back the petals in order to expose the hidden heart. Roslyn watched him and it seemed to her that the gesture was a threat. Then he tossed the broken flower over the parapet, took her by the arm and said curtly that it was time they were joining the dinner party.

  Did he always come up to Dar al Amra for dinner? she wondered, feeling the tautness of her face, and the controlled pressure of his fingers about her arm. She hoped he didn’t! She hoped very much that she wouldn’t have to see Duane Hunter more than was unavoidable.

  The dining room at Dar al Amra was as unconventional as its occupants, for they ate at small tables set in front of banquettes. Roslyn was companioned by Madame Gerard, very elegant in prune-coloured lace. Isabela was seated between the two men.

  Her eyes were dramatically tinted, her dress the vin rosé of her lips, from out of which came wit, laughter and mockery in equal doses for her companions. Roslyn couldn’t help watching the vivacity of her head and hand movements, the Moorish lamplight catching the jewelled arrow that secured her dark hair in a rich chignon.

  ‘Nanette, how kind of you to give me two men to dine with,’ she carolled from the other table. ‘But why did you not keep one of them for the amusement of yourself - and little Roslyn, of course.’

  ‘I am a rather wicked old woman, Isabela.’ Nanette dabbed at her lips with her napkin and took a sip of Chinon blanc from her green flute. ‘I could not be sure which of my grandsons you would prefer to torment tonight, so I decided to let them share you.’

  Isabela had the laugh of a coloratura soprano and it rang out in that Moorish room. ‘Yes, you are a little wicked, chére madame. ‘You have lived so long in the East that you have absorbed its polygamous attitudes.’

  ‘Perhaps I have absorbed a great deal of the East.’ Nanette smiled at Roslyn, and indicated with a very Gallic gesture that she drink her wine. ‘I have lived at El Kadia for close on fifty years. I have seen it in war and peace, and now when I go to Paris I feel almost a stranger.’

  ‘Paris will never completely forget Nina Nanette,’ Tristan said gallantly, and turning towards his grandmother he raised his flute of wine. ‘To you, Nanette, always du chien.’

  ‘Merci, Tristan.’ Her blue eyes softened, then flashed in challenge to Duane. ‘And what do you say, mon garçon? Have you a gallantry to offer your old grandmother?’

  ‘You will never grow old while your eyes stay blue as a girl’s,’ he replied, in his laziest voice.

  Roslyn heard Nanette catch her breath, then she inclined her snow-blue head to her half-English grandson and continued with her meal. Their first course was a spiced soup called chorba, and Roslyn was glad to resort to her wine every now and again. .

  ‘The shop windows of Paris are like stage-settings,’ Isabela remarked. ‘This dress I am wearing was bought there.’

  ‘The dress becomes you, Doña Sol, but then you would look sexy in sackcloth,’ Duane said mockingly. ‘How are the aches and pains of your early morning gallop? Have they subsided yet?’

  ‘I wonder that you have the nerve to ask, you barbarian.’ Isabela studied his hard, brown face with her head on one side. ‘You have not any sentiment in you,’ she accused.

  Bravo Isabela for saying it, Roslyn thought, her glance flicking the tropical grey worsted that made Duane Hunter look armoured in steel. He was gazing at the Portuguese girl with a half-smile on his lips, and the coppery lights in his eyes made them look less green and menacing than they had looked up on the harem tower.

  The babouches of Jakoub and an Arab youth jrustled across the carpet as they brought in the second course, shoulder of gazelle with a herb stuffing and a garnishing of vegetables in season. The Arab boy came to Roslyn’s side and proffered the dish of vegetables. She raised her grey eyes to smile her acceptance ... and the smile froze on her lips at the sharp way he backed away from her, almost dropping the dish in his haste. He muttered something, and Roslyn, distressed, was conscious of Duane Hunter’s piercing glance. He rapped out something in Arabic and the boy sullenly held out the dish for Roslyn, whose hands were trembling as she took a small helping of vegetables. She couldn’t understand the boy’s reaction. It hurt and bewildered her.

  ‘It is all right, my child.’ Nanette gave her hand a pat as the servants departed. ‘Arabs are very superstitious, but you will grow used to their ways.’

  ‘Superstitious?’ Roslyn was still mystified by the incident.

  ‘It’s your eyes,’ Duane said curtly. ‘Grey eyes are regarded with mistrust by the Arabs.’

  Roslyn flinched at the way he said it, then she bent her head over her plate and tears stung her eyes. She blinked hard and managed to subdue them, but the urge to run out of this house was not so easy to control. Her fork carried food to her mouth and she chewed automatically without tasting a thing. Isabela gave her a long stare of open curiosity, then conversation was resumed again, a buzz of voices to Roslyn who felt awkward, and hurt. She wished fiercely that she had not accepted Madame Gerard’s offer of hospitality. She felt she couldn’t stay here and decided to tell Nanette in the morning that she wanted to return to England.

  Coffee was served in the salon by Jakoub, and Roslyn sat down on a hassock to drink hers. She felt shielded by her decision to leave Dar al Amra in the mornings whatever was said, or thought, would not matter if she didn’t have to stay here.

  Tristan approached her with a small glass of cognac. ‘Shall I tip it into your coffee?’ he smiled. ‘The two together are a splendid tonic.’

  She liked Tristan, who looked so much like poor Armand, and she held out her cup and breathed the aroma of the cognac as it sank golden into the dark coffee. ‘There,’ Tristan said, ‘drink that up and all your cares will steal away.’

  ‘Thank you, monsieur,’ she smiled up at him.

  ‘You are welcome, mademoiselle.’

  She watched Tristan walk to the piano, then became aware that his cousin was watching her through the smoke of the cheroot he had just lighted. Dark brown, and lethal as himself! She took a gulp at the potent contents of her coffee cup, and felt reckless enough a minute later to gaze openly at Tristan, so Gallic and good-looking in his immaculate dinner jacket.

  ‘Would you like me to play something for you?’ Tristan was gazing directly back at her. ‘You look like a squirrel, Roslyn—’ and he ran his hands, along the keys, producing a gay, woodsy tune that finally scampered up and up, as though into the shielding greenery of a tree.

  Roslyn laughed, cognac-happy she supposed, but Isabela was not going to be left out of the limelight for very long, a
nd with a rustle of vin rosé silk she joined Tristan at the piano. ‘That is very quaint,’ she said to him, ‘but for the love of music play something that has depth, drama, emotion.’

  ‘In other words, play something which Isabela can sing,’ he mocked. ‘What will it be, my diva?’

  Though Isabela was vain and even a little malicious, Roslyn had already heard enough of her voice to know it was a thrilling one, and she felt a tingle of anticipation as the singer and the composer fell into a lively discussion about the aria she should sing. There was the song of the Tartar maiden in Prince Igor, which she had always adored. Then she shook her head and fell into the demure pose of Iris, the kidnapped mousmé.

  ‘Not quite in character,’ Duane called out, his dark face expressing a lazy enjoyment in the pantomime. ‘Delilah or Salome would suit you much better.’

  At once before their eyes she became Salome. The scene, she informed them, was the moment when King Herod sees Salome in the moonlight kissing the lips of the severed head of Joknaan the Prophet. She approached a table on which stood a platter of fruit, bent over it and turned round, a rose and green melon in her hands. Roslyn heard Duane chuckle to himself; his eyes through his cheroot smoke were drowsily content as a big cat’s.

  A few Moorish lamps cast pools of tinted light and shadow about the room, and Isabela stood half in shadow as she sang to them, the rather shallow person that she was submerged in the deep glory of her coloratura voice.

  Roslyn listened with her arms clasped round her knees, cold little bumps rising on her skin as the finale of the song was reached and the ensuing silence was broken as they applauded Isabela’s performance. It was then found that the content of the song had somehow set the mood for a discussion about that many-sided emotion called love. ‘It is, I suppose, next to death the biggest drama in our lives,’ Tristan swung round from the piano to survey everyone with a mournful smile touched with mischief. ‘Love, I mean. Love, the cruel. Love the denouement, the end that promises more.’

  ‘Like old brandy, love must be enjoyed slowly.’ Nanette’s hands were cupping an inhaler, her smile was a little mysterious. ‘I gaze into this glass - brandy glasses are a little like witch-balls, are they not? - and I see again the mistakes I made long ago, the heartaches I caused myself because being young I was also wilful. But for me all that is passed, and I can do nothing about the mistakes you four young people will make in your turn.’

  ‘Come, Nanette, your happiness with grandpère was proverbial.’ Tristan rose and went over to a smoking table to help himself to a cigarette. Duane extended a light and the eyes of the cousins met briefly.

  ‘Happiness, like the aroma of cognac, is at its strongest when the bowl stands empty,’ their grandmother said tartly. ‘Happiness is an after-taste, too heady at the time to be appreciated by more than the senses. Inevitably a mémoire du coeur.’

  ‘I want happiness right now,’ Isabela said, with a prima donna outthrowing of her lovely arms. ‘I demand that life give me everything while I am young.’

  ‘Life will oblige in many respects, and it will also cheat,’ Nanette said, with a wicked little chuckle. Then her blue glance pierced the man who faced her on a divan. ‘What do you have to say about all this, mon cher? Cynicism is sometimes a shield for a romantic heart, though in your case I have my doubts.’

  Duane Hunter had taken a peach from the side platter of fruit, and he was looking quizzical as he broke the peach in half and removed the stone at its heart. ‘A peach, I think, would have been a much more symbolic fruit for Eve to have plucked,’ he drawled. ‘Soft and enticing on the outside, but just look at this!’

  He held up the large stone, then tossed it into an ashtray and bit into the fruit with careless enjoyment.

  ‘Where did you learn to be so cynical?’ Nanette spoke sharply, as though his action with the peach stone had really hurt her. ‘What happened to you out in the green hell which used to be your home? Was it a woman, Duane?’

  ‘Does it always have to be a woman ?’

  Roslyn flicked a glance at him as he wiped his fingers on a large white handkerchief, and she noticed how the lamplight cast his profile in copper and showed its taut, rather cruel lines.

  ‘You are all Latin, Nanette, and so you see everything in terms of the eternal battle of the sexes,’ he said lazily. ‘I am neither a true Latin, nor a real Britisher. The traits of each are at war in me, and if I am a cynic, then I was born that way.’

  ‘I wonder?’ His grandmother was giving him an old-fashioned look. ‘Remind me to have a long private talk with you one day, mon cher. No grandson of mine should be so devoid of the romantic spirit as you appear to be.’

  ‘A romantic I might not be,’ he grinned, ‘but I always enjoy long private talks with beautiful women.’

  Nanette smiled and played a moment with her rings, then she looked directly at Roslyn. ‘Ah, pauvre petite, it has been a long day for you and those eyes of grey are barely able to keep sleep at bay. Allons, let you and me be off to our beds!’

  Duane rose at once and helped his grandmother to her feet. He towered over her, the kind of man, Roslyn thought, who seemed stamped with a hard maturity that had come to him as a boy. She could not for the life of her visualize him as a child; but a picture of Tristan in a sailor suit sprang easily to her mind.

  ‘Continue with your party, mes enfants,’ Nanette smiled at Isabela and the two men. ‘Bonne nuit.’

  ‘Bonne nuit,’ Roslyn echoed, glancing round at the trio, Isabela lounging with grace among the cushions of a divan, Tristan propped in his dark attractiveness against the grand piano, Duane armoured in his steel-grey. Tristan alone smiled at her.

  She parted from Nanette at the blue door of her room, and took along to her own bedroom an impression of fragile porcelain, cleverly tinted but lined with age and the threat of a sudden breaking-up. Saying good-bye to Nanette would be hard, but Roslyn had made up her mind to leave Dar al Amra before the place laid its spell upon her ... before the desert all around began to call to her.

  Her Arab bed was strange but comfortable, and she laid a long time beneath its netting listening to the cicadas and the tick of the clock on her night table.

  It was very late, she surmised, when she heard good-nights being exchanged down in the Court of the Veils. ‘Who was she, Duane?’ The voice of Isabela Fernao floated upwards and in through the harem lattices of Roslyn’s room. ‘Was she very attractive, this woman who made your heart so hard?’

  ‘She’s someone I never talk about.’ Then he added in a gentler tone, ‘Goodnight, Doña Sol. You must sing to me again some time.’

  Footfalls echoed across the tiles of the courtyard, then they died away into the night, under the palms, while somewhere in the desert an animal howled mournfully.

  Roslyn hoisted herself on an elbow and plumped the big, square pillow over the sausage bolster and settled down again. Her first day out of hospital had been a long, eventful one and though she felt so tired, sleep was proving very elusive tonight. She just couldn’t stop thinking about the Gerards and seeing in her mind their striking faces, which the turbulent history of the family had modelled into lines of distinction and authority.

  That history included the Reign of Terror, the tumbrel and guillotine. Soldiers who had explored the Sahara and fought in it; planters who had set up outposts of civilization. Women who had been headstrong and lovely ...

  The woman in Duane Hunter’s jungle past had been Eke that, Roslyn thought sleepily. Lovely ... the type who broke hearts and left them ravaged by bitterness. Those that healed were never the same as before, a hardness set in, along with a distrust of women that was probably insurmountable.

  Roslyn’s eyelids grew heavy and her lashes settled into stillness on her cheeks. When the desert prowler came and howled a little closer to the walls of Dar al Amra, Roslyn was sleeping like a baby.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ROSLYN awoke as the desert sun burst into life against the tawny walls of Dar al Amra.
She had grown used in hospital to a bed swathed in netting, but not to seeing the sun filtering through harem lattices, and for a moment she couldn’t think where she was.

  Then it came to her, this was the desert domain of the Gerard family. Madame Gerard had brought her here yesterday. She lay a moment, letting the events of yesterday pass one after the other through her mind, then she sat up and pushed aside the tent-like netting.

  Nanette would be annoyed, even a little hurt by her decision to leave Dar al Amra. She would be bound to say that Roslyn had given herself very little time to settle down here and grow used to the ways of the Gerards. If there were only two Gerards for her to grow used to, but there was a third, a man she would never like, or be liked by. Somehow he made it impossible for her to remain a guest in this desert house.

  She slipped out of bed and wandered in bare feet to the nearest window. The sun stroked her neck and her bare arms and she gave a shiver of catlike pleasure at the warm touch of the sun, the hint of spice in the morning air. Somehow she knew that the life she had forgotten had held very little sunshine. She had been reared in an orphanage, and later on her home had been a hostel. Though her job had been that of an air hostess, flying schedules would not have given her much chance to explore the various stopping places. Airfield canteens would be all she saw of far-distant places.

  The sun was warm and beguiling, and on impulse she ran into the bathroom to brush her teeth and have a wash. She felt an urge to take a walk, and the courtyard below was empty but for the flutter of pigeons and other birds.

  Back in her room she opened the clothes closet and selected a pair of tansy-gold pants and a cream cotton shirt, which fitted rather loosely because of her loss of weight but felt cool against her skin. She gave her hair a vigorous brushing, decided that it was not yet hot enough for a hat and hurried out eagerly to explore the Court of the Veils.

  The young are all part of nature and Roslyn - quite unaware - blended with the early morning freshness of the trees and flowers of the courtyard as she wandered about among them. Roses clustered and swarmed with bees, swinging out from a trellis on a warm breeze. There was a bush of white camellias, stunning things that would have cost quite a price in a florist’s shop, plumed violet jacarandas, and trim scented junipers. The fountains had not yet been turned on and they stood shaded by the great charmed tree that might have been a weeping pepper.